East Asia and Western Pacific METEOROLOGY AND CLIMATE

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Processes of Hicroscale Air-Sea Interaction
Few examples of our own research are selected to demonstrate that
microscale air-sea interaction processes are important in linking the
atmosphere and oceans. The wind stress acting to the sea surface Is
definitely a critical parameter for the climate research. The wind
stress (r) can be referred to in different forms, such as the windstress
coefficient (C-i A) » the wind-friction velocity (u^), and the
roughness length (z ). These terms are related through the so-called
logarithmic wind profile (Wu 1968),
c io - [1]
where U is the wind velocity at the elevation z above the mean sea surface,
K, is the von Karman universal constant, p is the density of air,
and the subscript 10 corresponds to 10 m above the mean sea surface.
I would like to emphasize though that our research and your demand are
the same; it is to be able to associate all parameters mentioned above
with environmental variables. First of several environmental variables,
of course, is the wind velocity, we have established that the windstress
coefficient increases with the wind velocity as shown in Fig. 1.
T 1
Figure 1, Wind-Stress Coefficients over the Sea Surface. The data are
shown as open circles, the dashed line corresponds to Eq.
[1], and the solid line is a linear approximation. This is
reproduced from Wu (1982).